Top 5: Grief, mourning, pity
+ Francis Fukuyama and the kids of sperm donation
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“An Atheist Reconsiders God in the Pandemic” (New York Magazine)
Because Sarah Jones’ essay is a beautiful rumination on grief, religious ritual, and searching for God after atheism conversion. Matthew Sitman also sat down with Sarah to break down these themes in the essay, .
By the start of October, more than 700,000 people had died of COVID-19 in the United States. A recent memorial on the National Mall takes this absence and renders it tangible. Better than an open letter, more sinew than a ghost. On the even grass before the Washington Monument, there were hundreds of thousands of white flags — a national surrender. I could plant a flag for my grandfather, who died of the virus nearly a year ago. But the gesture feels thin. Not that the memorial is a bad idea: It may provoke in the viewer feelings of sadness or regret or the emotion that arises in response to an absence, an emotion I cannot name but that is as close to fatigue as it is to grief or nostalgia. I don’t know what exactly I would want from a memorial — whether it’s catharsis or meaning or something else altogether. I thought several hundred times this year, Maybe I should go to church.
“The Great Beyond” (Real Life)
Because social media is changing how we mourn and how we remember people we’ve lost.
“The portal that allowed people to communicate with [my brother] across distance in life continues to offer a shadow of that promise after his death. The page is now an archive that makes visible that impulse to continue communicating with the dead on social media, to a degree normalizing and socially validating spiritual practices that have largely been neglected as society has become more secularized. As sociologists Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling detail, modernity has traditionally sequestered death into privatized, isolated spaces. However, perhaps we are witnessing the pendulum swinging back.”
“Francis Fukuyama’s Defense of Liberalism” (Substack - Persuasion)
Because this interview is chock-full of gems from scholar Francis Fukuyama: redefining neoliberalism, explaining the Right/Left critiques of liberalism, how to reclaim liberalism, and more.
“But the other part is much more difficult, which is the pragmatic argument for liberalism: It’s a powerful way of governing diversity, but it doesn't get you out of bed in the morning. You don't say, “Oh, am I grateful that we’re not in a civil war with people that don't look like me today!” I think that you need a more positive understanding of why you want to live in a liberal society, and that partly has to do with national identity, although a lot of contemporary progressives have downplayed the nation-state, or even attack the nation as a kind of reactionary vessel for exclusion, racial intolerance, or international aggression.
I think it’s really important to recapture the high ground and come up with a sense of national identity that people are not simply unembarrassed by, but are actually proud of, and to define that. And for that, you need to have borders, you need to have a kind of shared narrative. And there are some real obstacles, both on the left and the right, to creating that.”
“The Children of Sperm Donors Want to Change the Rules of Conception” (The Atlantic)
Because advancements in conception, especially in the donor sperm realm, are bringing about important moral, social, and legal questions of the right to identity and self-knowledge.
“We naturally recognize this in situations where a child has never met a parent owing to tragic life circumstances—so how does the situation then differ when the bond is severed by biotechnology instead? In my conversations with donor-conceived people, they often grappled with comparisons to more familiar scenarios. They are asking for rights, but they are also asking for compassion.”
“Pity, Power, and Presence” (Substack - The Convivial Society)
Because last week, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warned of the purposeful neglect by Facebook of their platform’s effects on mental health. L.M Sacasas breaks down an important part of Haugen’s testimony on the feedback cycle that online interaction lacks and how we might consider “embodied presence” and the virtue of pity in social media interaction. See also today’s New York Times report on Facebook’s concerns its losing adolescents, and its targeted, expensive efforts to try to get them back on the hook.
“But a simulation of the experience of power, understood as the collapse of the space between impulse and act, may be more generalized in online environments where a forgetfulness of the body is also a default setting.
The interval of hesitation is not unlike what Haugen described, in very different language, as part of the embodied feedback cycle of human interaction, where a wince and a tear are visible to the one who elicits them from the other. And in this way the idealized frictionless quality of online actions, particularly in the absence of the body, can be understood as an inducement to cruelty. Although, inducement may not be quite right. Perhaps it is better to say that in online environments, certain critical impediments to cruelty, fragile and tenuous as they already are in the course of human affairs, are lifted.”